Chapter 1: What happened during the winter cabin trip?
I still don't know if what we saw up there was an actual wendigo or just something that wanted us to believe that's what it was. I only know that I can't hear the sound of wind in trees anymore without tasting metal in the back of my throat and feeling that same old cold crawl up my spine. There were three of us on that trip. Me, my cousin Tyler, and our friend Jess.
We're all from downstate Michigan, but my mom's side of the family has this old hunting cabin way up in northern Michigan, near the top of the mitten, almost to the bridge. I'd only been there once as a kid in the summer. My uncle used it every winter, though, for deer season and ice fishing. until he disappeared in a storm up near Marquette when I was 16. They never found his body.
This was years later. I'd inherited partial ownership of the cabin after my grandfather died, and the three of us thought a week-long winter escape sounded like a good idea. No work. No bosses. No schedules. Just snow, a wood stove, and too much whiskey. That was the plan. We left early on a Sunday in January.
The kind of morning where the world looks washed out, like someone turned down the saturation. The highway was mostly clear, just that fine powder blowing across the road in streaks. We had my SUV loaded with groceries, way too much gear, and one of those plastic tubs full of firewood to get us started until we could dig out the woodpile at the cabin.
Feels like we're driving into a horror movie, Jess said, leaning between the front seats as we headed north. She always said stuff like that. She's the true crime addict of the group, the one who falls asleep to podcasts about unsolved murders. Tyler grinned. Yeah, but we're the idiots who don't turn around when the creepy local warns us about the curse.
I laughed and said, We're literally going to my family's cabin. The only curse is probably black mold and bad insulation. I said that, and I swear within a couple hours it felt less like a joke. By the time we got off the main highway, the snow was heavier.
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Chapter 2: Who were the main characters on the trip?
Those last few towns blur together up there. One gas station, a bar with a name like the North Trail or the Timberline, a church, and then just trees again. Endless, dark, snow-laden trees. We stopped at this last gas station before the forest road, the kind of place that looks like it's been there since the 70s.
Fluorescent lights humming, shelves of snacks, motor oil, and dusty snow globes with black bears inside. While Jess grabbed snacks, I went to pay for gas. The man behind the counter looked like he'd grown out of the pine boards. Old, thin, cheeks hollowed in that way that has nothing to do with diet and everything to do with the cold and a lifetime of hard work.
Heading up County 14, he asked, nodding toward the direction we were going. Yeah, family cabin off that old logging road, past, uh, Birch Lake, I think, I said. It had been years. I was going mostly off memory and some scribbled directions from my mom. His eyes sharpened on me. Your people the Hales? I blinked. Yeah, my grandfather was Mark Hale. He stared at me a second too long.
There was something like recognition and something like pity there. He nodded once, slow. Used to see your uncle come through. He's the one went missing in that storm. Yeah, I said, feeling that old familiar tug in my chest. That's him. Cabin still standing? He asked. As far as I know. He glanced out the window.
The snow had started coming down harder, big fat flakes swirling under the gas station canopy lights. You folks packing enough food? He asked. Yeah, I said. We've got groceries for a week. He hesitated, then said quietly, You make sure you eat your own. From your own bags. Nothing left behind. Nothing from the woods. You understand me. That prickled the back of my neck. I laughed it off.
Yeah, we're not planning on eating tree bark.
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Chapter 3: What eerie encounter did they have in the woods?
He didn't smile. After dark, if you hear anything that sounds like your uncle or your granddad or anyone you miss, he met my eyes. You don't open the door. I felt my mouth go dry. What? He slid my receipt across the counter, voice flat. Some things like to borrow voices. That's all. I walked back to the SUV, feeling like someone had poured ice water down the back of my coat.
When I told Tyler and Jess what he'd said, they both laughed, but it was forced. "'That guy probably tells everyone that,' Tyler said as he buckled in, probably bored out of his mind. Jess shrugged. "'It's kind of on-brand for where we're going, though,' Creepy Forest Legend quota checked off." Now we just need a missing poster and a cabin that doesn't have cell service.
Pretty sure that last one is guaranteed, I said, putting the SUV in drive. I wish we'd taken him more seriously. The turnoff from the county road was half buried, just a battered green sign with the number and a narrow track of churned snow from snowmobiles and maybe one truck. Trees crowded in.
tall black pines and bare-limbed maples, their branches heavy with snow, forming a tunnel over the road that immediately cut the light. The tires crunched and squealed over packed snow, and every little slide made Jess grab the door handle and swear. "'It's farther than I remember,' I muttered after twenty minutes of winding deeper and deeper."
The odometer said we'd gone less than ten miles, but it felt like a lot more. Everything looks the same out there. Snow. Trees. Occasional glimpse of a frozen swamp under the trees. Cattails trapped in ice. The first odd thing we saw was about five miles in. Tyler said, "'What the hell is that?' and leaned forward, pointing through the windshield."
Out between the trees, maybe 30 yards off the right side of the road, something pale was hanging from a low branch. At first I thought it was just snow clumped in an odd way, but then the wind shifted and it slowly rotated. It was a deer skull, stripped clean, empty sockets staring toward the road. It dangled from a length of rope twisting gently.
Below it, half buried in the snow, were shapes that looked like more bones, arranged in a circle around the base of the tree. The snow had drifted into them so they looked like pale fingers reaching up. Please tell me that's not some backwoods deliverance crap, Jess said. Probably just hunters being edgy, Tyler said, but his voice lacked conviction. Hunters don't usually decorate trees, I said.
They just take the antlers. The SUV slid a little as I slowed to stare. For a split second, just long enough to make me doubt my own eyes, I thought I saw boot prints around the base of that tree. Not recent ones, more like shallow depressions half-filled with snow, just enough to suggest someone had stood there looking out at the road. The road's getting worse, Jess said, maybe on purpose.
Let's just get there. We're gonna get stuck if we keep stopping. She was right. I pressed the gas and we kept going. Another mile or so, and the trees changed. Taller, closer.
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Chapter 4: What warnings did they receive from the gas station attendant?
The snow seemed thicker here, the light dimmer even though we were still hours from sunset. When we finally reached the narrow turnoff to the cabin, my hands ached from gripping the wheel. The cabin sat back from the end of the road, huddled in a clearing surrounded by pines.
It wasn't big, single-story, steep roof under a thick coat of snow, a short stack of a chimney with just a hint of smoke staining the snow around it from winter's long past. The porch sagged a little, but the structure itself looked intact. I felt a weird mix of nostalgia and disquiet.
The last time I'd been there the sun had been shining, and my grandfather had stood on that porch with a beer in his hand, laughing as my uncle cleaned fish on a board set across two sawhorses. Now the porch was empty. The windows were dark. We unloaded the SUV in several trips, our boots sinking into knee-high drifts.
It was that dry, squeaky kind of snow that sprays out around your boots and gets into everything. The cold burned my nostrils when I breathed in. The key my mom had mailed me worked in the front door, but I had to put my shoulder into it to get it open. The door scraped over snow and something else just inside. The smell hit us first. It wasn't rot, exactly.
More like old ashes, mouse droppings, and stale air that hadn't been moved in months. Dust and cold and something faintly metallic underneath. Jess wrinkled her nose. Cozy, she muttered, stepping in. The inside was almost exactly how I remembered it, just dustier and darker. Single big room with a sleeping loft above the far end. Wood-burning stove on one side.
A battered couch and recliner facing a stone fireplace that probably hadn't been used in years. Kitchenette along the back wall. Old gas stove. Sink. A hand pump next to it for drawing water from the well. Tyler set the plastic tub of firewood down by the stove and clapped his gloved hands. Alright, first order of business, heat.
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Chapter 5: How did the atmosphere change after nightfall?
Second, liquor. We got the stove going first, using kindling and newspaper that had been left in a crate beside it. Once the fire caught and the stove began to tick and hum, the cabin started to feel less like a tomb. Our breath stopped fogging in front of our faces, fingers thawed enough to ache, and the shadows retreated a little.
It was while we were unpacking that I noticed the marks on the inside of the door. They were faint, almost lost in the grain of the wood, but once I saw them I couldn't unsee them. Scratches at about shoulder height. Not random, like a dog trying to get out, but long vertical gouges clustered around the latch. Four parallel lines, then another cluster, then another.
hey i said quietly you guys see this jess came over holding a bag of pasta she frowned and traced the grooves with one gloved finger what the hell did that tyler looked too bear maybe he said "'Black bears aren't really around in winter,' I said. "'They'd be hibernating.' "'Maybe raccoons,' he said. "'Or something trying to get in for heat.' "'Raccoons don't have claws that big,' Jess said.
I looked closer. The cuts were deep, deeper than I'd thought at first glance. Whatever had made them had put force into it, had kept at it long enough to leave a pattern. The metal latch itself was slightly bent. "'We're in the middle of the woods,' Tyler said finally, stepping back." Weird scratches on an old cabin door are like, standard. Let's not freak out on day one.
He wasn't wrong, and I didn't want to be the one to ruin the vibe, so I let it go. We unpacked, claimed bunks in the sleeping loft, and made a pot of chili on the stove. By the time the sun started to drop behind the trees, the cabin felt, if not exactly homey, at least survivable. The first night was when the woods started talking. It was sometime after midnight when I woke up.
The loft was just dark shapes. The beam overhead, the railing, Jess's sleeping bag across from mine, Tyler's slow, heavy breathing from the bunk below me. The fire had burned down to coals. I could see the faint red glow through the stove's little glass window. I lay there for a second, wondering what had woken me. Then I heard it.
At first I thought it was wind in the trees, a low moan, rising and falling. It sounded distant, filtered, the way sound gets muffled by snow and walls. But there was something off about it. It wasn't constant the way wind is. It came in bursts, rising and then cutting off too sharply, almost like calls. I propped myself up on one elbow, straining to hear.
It came again, faint but clear enough to separate from the creaks of the cabin and Tyler's breathing. It was a voice. Far away, out in the trees, someone was calling. The sound bled through the walls, distorted by distance and cold. It could have been anything. My brain filled in the missing syllables. Hello? I swallowed hard. Maybe a snowmobiler, lost or broken down.
Maybe some other cabin nearby. We weren't the only ones dumb enough to be up here in winter.
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Chapter 6: What strange events occurred during the night?
Lou! Lou! This time, the hairs on my arms stood up. There was something wrong about the way it stretched, like whoever was calling didn't know how words were supposed to work, like they'd heard it once and were trying to reproduce it with the wrong shape of mouth. I held my breath, waiting for it to come again.
Instead, there was a new sound, a soft, deliberate crunch of snow right outside the door. My heart hammered. Slowly, barely daring to breathe, I crept down the ladder. Tyler stirred, but didn't wake. Jess snorted softly in her sleep. I reached the bottom of the ladder and crossed to the front door, every step feeling incredibly loud.
I stood there in my socks and t-shirt staring at the wood, remembering the scratches. The crunch came again, closer this time, right up against the wall. And then, clear as if it had been standing in the room with me, a voice said, Evan, my name, drawn out in that same wrong way, the vowels stretched too long, the consonants almost popping at the end. It sounded like my uncle.
I hadn't heard his voice in years, not in anything but old home movies. But the tone, the half-question, the lilt was him. Or close enough that my stomach dropped out. I didn't move. My body felt nailed to the floor. The voice came again, coaxing, closer. Something scratched along the door. Not claws this time, but something trying to find the latch. It rattled. The wood creaked.
Whatever was on the other side pressed against it making the hinges groan. I couldn't have moved if I wanted to. My legs shook, my teeth chattered, not from cold but from a terror so deep it felt animal. The latch jiggled again. And then, as if whoever, or whatever, was out there had suddenly lost interest, it stopped. The pressure on the door lifted.
The crunch of snow moved away, slow and measured. It didn't fade like footsteps. It went from right there to gone. I stood there for a long time, ears straining, but the only sounds were the tick of cooling metal and Tyler shifting in his sleep. I didn't sleep again that night.
I sat in the recliner with a blanket around my shoulders, staring at the door until the windows started to pale with dawn. When Jess came down the ladder, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, she looked at me and frowned. You look like hell. Did either of you wake up last night? I asked. Tyler yawned behind her. No, why? I told them, trying to keep my voice even. The footsteps. The voice.
My name in my uncle's voice. Tyler frowned. Maybe you were dreaming, man. First night in a new place, you were already freaked out. Brains do weird stuff. I was sitting in that chair, I said, for hours, until the sun came up. I didn't go back to sleep. Jess hesitated. Could it have been some hunter or something? Maybe someone who knew your uncle? "'Out here?'
I said, in the middle of the night, walking right up to the door and saying my name like that. She didn't answer. I got up and opened the door. The cold slammed into the cabin. Fresh snow had fallen during the night, soft powder on top of the older, packed stuff.
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Chapter 7: How did the characters react to their growing hunger?
"'Maybe the guy at the gas station was just trying to get in your head,' she said. "'You were primed to hear something.'" Maybe it really was the wind and your brain turned it into your uncle. I didn't argue with her. It was easier to believe that than the alternative. We tried to shake it off. We made coffee on the stove, got the stove roaring again, and planned out our day.
The idea was to hike down to the frozen lake my grandfather used to fish on. just to see if the old ice shack was still standing. By midday, with the sun blazing through a thin gap in the clouds, it almost felt normal. We strapped on snowshoes and took turns breaking trail, laughing when Tyler wiped out on a buried log.
Jess kept stopping to take pictures of bare birch branches against the sky, and for a couple hours, it was just winter in the woods. The cabin looked almost friendly when we saw it from the rise above the lake on our way back. Smoke from the stove chimney smeared into the cold air. Our tracks crisscrossed the clearing. That's when Jess stopped and said very quietly, "'We didn't make those.'"
About 20 yards from the cabin, something had walked across our earlier tracks. The snowshoe impressions were still there, clean and crisp. But there was another set of prints cutting across them. They weren't animal. I knew that right away. They were too long, too narrow, almost like bare feet, if bare feet had toes that ended in points.
Each impression was deep, like whatever had made them weighed a lot more than its footprint suggested. They came in pairs, like strides, each one three, maybe four feet apart. They went from the tree line, straight across the path we'd taken that morning, over to the side of the cabin. And then they stopped, right under the window to the loft. Tyler let out a low whistle that steamed in the air.
Probably some weird melting pattern, he said, but he didn't sound convinced. Jess shook her head. Those are footprints. I walked beside them, looking down. The size of them bothered me. They were long, yeah, but not huge. Not like monster movie tracks. Longer than my boot by a few inches, maybe. They'd have fit a tall, thin man. But no one walks barefoot out here in January.
I followed the line of them to where they ended, directly under the loft window. The snow there was punched down hard, as if whoever it was had stood there a long time, just looking up. You said you heard it last night, Jess said quietly, at the door. I nodded, throat tight. But these aren't at the door, they're under the window, she said. I looked up at the loft window.
The glass was crusted with frost on the inside, a milky film that turned the world outside into vague shadows. From the inside, I realized, you wouldn't have been able to see someone standing right below it. But they would have been able to see our silhouettes in the dim cabin light if they were close enough. That night, nobody slept easily.
We double bolted the door and dragged the heavy dresser from the wall to wedge in front of it. We closed the curtains on every window, building the illusion that if we couldn't see out, nothing could see in. Jess tried to make it normal by cooking something elaborate, a big pan of cheesy potatoes and sausage, on the stove. It helped a little.
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Chapter 8: What was the shocking discovery at the end of the trip?
Her hand stopped, fingers hovering over the metal. For a long moment she stood like that, frozen. Then, slowly, she dropped her arm to her side. Without a word, she padded over to the couch and sat down. Not curled up, not lying back, just sat, upright, hands folded in her lap, staring at the door. She stayed like that the rest of the night.
I know because I watched her, on and off, every time I woke up. In the morning, she didn't remember any of it. "'You were sleepwalking,' I said as we stood by the stove, heating water for coffee. Her eyes widened. "'I haven't sleptwalked since I was twelve.' Maybe up here is bringing it back, Tyler said, trying to sound light and failing. Thin air, evil spirits, whatever.
Do you remember saying anything? I asked. She frowned, searching her memory. I had a weird dream, I think. Something about someone standing outside, asking to come in. I couldn't see them, just where their breath was fogging on the glass. They said they were freezing, over and over.
i remember feeling she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered i remember feeling really guilty like it was my fault your fault they were out there i asked her eyes flicked to mine my fault they were hungry We all went quiet after that. We decided to stick closer to the cabin that day. The wind had picked up and thick, low clouds promised more snow.
We tromped around the clearing, dug out more firewood from the stack my grandfather had left under a tarp, and took turns shooting at cans with the ratty old .22 rifle that had been hanging on hooks above the fireplace.
the more time we spent outside the more i noticed little things that didn't fit faint tracks at the edge of the clearing half filled with snow not deer those i recognized easily the delicate double marks and the specific way they moved in sets These were more like the prints we'd seen the day before. Long, narrow, deep.
They came close enough to get a good view of the cabin, then veered off into the trees. Once, when I bent down to study a set of them, Jess put a hand on my shoulder and said quietly, We should go in. My toes are numb. I glanced at her boots. They didn't look like they should be cold, but I nodded and let it go.
That afternoon, while Tyler tried and failed to get the old generator working, I dug through one of the cupboards looking for more matches. Instead, behind a stack of chipped plates, I found a leather-bound journal. The cover was cracked, the leather gone gray with age. When I opened it, the first few pages were full of my grandfather's neat printing.
Dates, notes about deer sightings, weather observations. Then, slowly, the handwriting got shakier. The entries farther apart. And then, about halfway through, the handwriting changed. It got tighter, more jagged. My uncle's hand. I knew it from old birthday cards. Most of his entries were like my grandfather's. What he'd seen on the trails. How thick the ice was.
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